What's the purpose of healing?
What most people get wrong about healing (plus, The Journey turns 1!)
One year with The Journey
This week marks our one-year anniversary. I’d like to take a second to thank you for being here, for your curiosity to explore this work, and for your willingness to educate yourself about your inner world.
I’d also like to give you the opportunity to leave any quick feedback you may have so that I can continue making this offering as valuable as possible for you. What would you like to see more/less of? What are your biggest questions/challenges when it comes to (psychedelic) healing? What resources or support would you embrace?
Please leave a comment below or message me directly in reply to this e-mail.
Here are the top 5 articles from the this past year:
What Most of Us Get Wrong About Healing
There’s a common misconception about what healing is about (and why we seek it).
I see it in others, I also see it in myself.
Thankfully, though, whenever you forget a lesson, the universe will create the circumstances to remind you. I’ve been reminded and, as a result, I’m here today to remind you, too.
Many who come to the healing work believe that the purpose of healing is to feel better.
The opposite — feeling terrible — is often what puts you on the path to begin with.
So, you do some of the hard, inner work. You face your shadow, process your repressed emotions, and sit with your darkness. You might feel worse initially, but eventually, you begin to feel better.
Until you feel worse again.
Huh?
“I knew it, I’m a lost cause, this wasn’t going to last anyways. I’m broken.”
Shame creeps in. You did all this work, you’re not supposed to feel this way anymore. Clearly, whatever you did hasn’t worked.
Wrong.
Healing does not mean you won’t experience difficult emotions again. You most certainly will. Emotions are the essence of the human experience. They are the compass of your heart. The language of your soul. They provide you with valuable information about your inner and outer world. You need emotions. All of them, not just the pleasant ones.
The reality is that healing is not about feeling better, it’s about getting better at feeling.
This further translates into the core of virtually all spiritual wisdom traditions: our ability to be with the present moment.
However it may show up. In light or in darkness. Whether it brings joy, sadness, ecstasy, fear, or boredom. The goal of healing is to develop your capacity to embrace all experiences equally, to not discriminate among them. To let them pass through you with equanimity and without judgment.
And guess what, you were once able to do that.
As a child, you didn’t feel bad for feeling sad, you simply felt sad. You didn’t feel the urge to repress your anger, you expressed it (and then you were probably joyful a few moments later). So clearly, the capacity to experience emotions this way is in you.
The path of healing, then, is one of removing all that’s in the way of returning to that.
The Essence of the Healing Path: Embracing Wholeness
Alright, so now that you know where to go, how do you get there?
While healing looks different for everyone, in some ways it’s also extremely similar, no matter what you’re healing.
The path of healing is the path of integrating all parts of you into your consciousness and learning to hold them with love, compassion, and equanimity.
You can do this by working through three steps:
You need to make unconscious parts of you conscious
You need to develop a relationship with previously repressed parts that is based on compassion and trust rather than shame and control
You need to learn to surrender to the fullest expression of your wholeness, aka whichever part of you is showing up with whichever emotion, you welcome it
Step 1: Make the unconscious parts conscious
Often, the parts in you that have the biggest influence on your life are also the parts you’re least aware of. Your psyche has suppressed them (usually for good reason), yet the limiting beliefs these parts hold still drive much of your behavior — especially those behaviors that you can’t seem to make sense of or control.
This first step is where psychedelic medicines can help tremendously. Ceremonies are not the only way to do this work, though. There’s also parts work such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, or depth psychology, which uses tools such as dreamwork, active imagination, and shadow work to illuminate your subconscious.
Step 2: Develop a loving relationship with all parts of yourself
The second step is crucial to what in the context of psychedelic work you’d call integration.
It’s often the much harder part. While (1) commonly arrives in the form of an insight or event, (2) is a life-long process. I’m still working on this to this date, and while I’ve made huge leaps, I also know that this will be the work of my life.
“The goal of spiritual practice is full recovery; and the only thing we need recovery from is a fractured sense of self. if we don’t already believe it ourselves, another person cannot convince us we’re okay.” - Marianne Williamson
How you relate to all parts of yourself builds the foundation for welcoming your emotional reality without judgment (the next step).
Step 3: Surrender to the expression of all parts of you at all times
The final step is learning to accept all emotional states without judgment so you can effortlessly let them flow through you.
In Buddhist philosophy, suffering is pain multiplied by resistance. If there’s no resistance, pain is just pain and you don’t need to suffer from it.
If you can learn to do this, you will no longer need any numbing or destructive coping mechanisms whether that’s substances, food, shopping, mindless scrolling, casual sex, or whatever your vice might be. You also ensure that nothing gets suppressed in the future, thus preventing dis-integration.
If you work with psychedelic medicine, the period after your journey can be a difficult one because your emotional depth and awareness are heightened, yet often you haven’t developed the ability to hold your expanded expression yet. A dear reader recently shared an article about “the negative side effects of Ayahuasca”, citing increased difficult emotional states post-ceremony. This is not a side effect, this is the medicine doing its work! The highs get higher and the lows get lower. This may seem scary, but what’s actually happening is that you’ve broadened your emotional range. You’re encountering the edges of your energy and are taken to places you haven’t been. The process of integration is the process of stabilizing and normalizing within your new, emotionally-broadened reality.
One of my dear guides shares a simple three-step tool that the plant medicine Ayahuasca taught her to practice this moment-to-moment: accept, allow, choose.
Accept that this part of you is showing up.
Allow the emotions it is bringing up to come through you.
Choose how to react to your emotional experience.
I will speak more in the upcoming weeks about these steps (especially the third one), so stay tuned for more on the wisdom our emotions hold.
Your Journey
Healing is not a one-time event, it is a constant practice. It will take time to learn these skills, and you will fail. I just failed recently, I repressed something, and I paid the price. Me writing to you today is me doing the work. My healing is your healing.
This doesn’t mean that once you embark on the path it will always be this hard and always feel like work. It will get easier because you get better at it. But it’s still a path because you have to continue doing what you did to heal, otherwise, it won’t last.
Finally, to commit to the healing path, you do not need to take psychedelics. It can help expedite things, but all you truly need are two types of practices:
Awareness-based practice: Anything that connects you deeper with the reality of your present-moment experience. For me, this is mainly meditation and yoga. It’s also sobriety. Breathwork. Spending time alone in nature.
Expression-based practice: Anything that provides a container for safely expressing what is coming up. My favorites are journaling and writing, dancing, authentic relating practices, and sharing circles.
Whatever speaks to you, choose something and commit to it. This is practice. Consistency is key. Every failure is a learning opportunity. Stick with it, and you will grow into a version of yourself beyond your wildest dream.
The Guest House by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.